Background reading on the Middle East is provided by John Keay, one of my favourite authors on history, who wrote “Sowing the Wind: The mismanagement of the Middle East, 1900-1960” in 2003, putting not only Lebanon, but also the rest of this area in its recent historic perspective. Keay is very good at painting the larger picture through highlighting individual episodes, and this book is another example of that quality – although, owing to the complexity perhaps, the book is occasionally somewhat chaotic. It does portray, however, the incredible inconsistency of especially the British government, which mostly appears due to clumsiness, childishness and petty rivalry, rather than a mischievous ploy to manipulate colonies and protectorates, although no doubt some of that has played a role as well. ( )

Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East] is my favorite of the three books that I have read by [John Keay]. The other two were on the spice trade and a history of India. I enjoyed the spice trade a lot, mostly due to the many anecdotes it contained. The history of India, I enjoyed less well. Although, I think it probably was a good general history, the history of India, which has not even been a united country in its current configuration for most of the 2000 years of so that he was covering, is just so massive. It called for someone with a lot of skill in making a large number of events form some coherent pattern. I don't think that is Keay's strength.

What his strength is, I think, is not to generalize history, but to personalize it. This is probably a lot easier in [Sowing the Wind] because the history is more recent, and, at least some of the personalities - Lawrence of Arabia, Churchill, Begin, Nassar, and others - are somewhat familiar. Others were not, to me. A woman named Gertrude Bell comes in early on as she travels through the region, later to become an important figure, and there are many others. In some ways this is history as a gossip column, even with the slight jadedness that comes with that.

The major part of the book goes from about 1900 to just after World War II. To generalize, it is a story of a struggle for autonomy and real liberation from colonial powers and later from interference by countries with business or security interests in the region, and how it was promised and taken away and botched again and again. Keay covers mainly the British involvement, just a little the French in Syria, and somewhat U.S. interference in the region. What really comes across is Western arrogance in feeling that they have some corner on the ability to govern, while all the while, they are manipulating governments to press their own interests and even involved in coups against democratically elected governments for that same end. Both Britain and the U.S. have a rather impressive history of interference in the Middle East, or, as Keay put it, ".. the Iraqi revolution seems to have taken him (Nassar) as much by surprise as everyone else. In the best traditions of Western diplomacy in the Middle East, the British and US embassies knew no more of it than they had of Rashi al-Kayllani's revolt in 1941 or would of the Iranian revolution in 1978-9. It was as if Western diplomats, hard pushed to keep track of upheavals for which their own government agencies were responsible, could scarcely be expected to anticipate those engineered by others."

If you want to know why Arabs (or Persians or Egyptians) might view us in a less than favorable light, this book would make a good start. It is also extremely helpful in understanding - as the title suggests - the tangled events and conflicts that have continued to the present. ( )